Freedom is an idea eternally existing in the divine Mind, God. Since man is the reflection of Mind, freedom also is native to man. Being unceasingly conscious of his freedom, man is in never-ending enjoyment of it. Because freedom is God-given, it lies deep in every human breast, and individuals have long striven to make it, with its kindred gifts of justice and equality, manifest in human experience. For example, some of the milestones along the road to freedom are the Magna Charta of the year 1215, by which English barons secured certain rights from the king, and the Perpetual League, or first charter, of the Swiss Confederation, concluded in 1291 by the mountaineers around Lake Lucerne to better defend themselves against "the cunning of the world." A great step toward freedom and the possession of human rights was later taken in the Reformation, and in the eighteenth century, history points to two outstanding landmarks: the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French Constituent Assembly.

These vindications of liberty greatly forwarded mankind's emancipation from oppression and inequality to the enjoyment of the inalienable rights which, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," with which their creator has endowed them. Yet these and other immortal expressions of liberty do not comprise the whole freedom of man. They do not go so far as to annul all subjection to evil. A higher declaration of the rights and liberties of man—although all of these had been claimed and demonstrated by Christ Jesus centuries before—was therefore needed, and it came through the discovery of Christian Science by Mary Baker Eddy. Thus her establishment of the Christian Science movement inaugurated a new crusade of freedom that is destined to abolish all slavery.

With the exception of the Bible, Mrs. Eddy's textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," contains the greatest proclamation of freedom the world has ever known. A stirring passage from its pages reads (p. 226): "God has built a higher platform of human rights, and He has built it on diviner claims. These claims are not made through code or creed, but in demonstration of 'on earth peace, good-will toward men.' Human codes, scholastic theology, material medicine and hygiene, fetter faith and spiritual understanding. Divine Science rends asunder these fetters, and man's birthright of sole allegiance to his Maker asserts itself."

Christian Science reveals this "higher platform of human rights" to be upheld by God's laws. These laws are beneficent, inviolable, everywhere operative, and they maintain man in unchanging health, perfection, freedom, and immortality, those native elements and rights from which he can never be alienated.

Spiritual seers, such as the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, glimpsing the one God and His manifestation, the Messiah, or Christ, with its power to liberate men from all oppression, lighted the torch of true freedom. It shone its brightest in the life of Christ Jesus, who was the freest man the world has ever known. Through his demonstration of the Christ, or Truth, he broke all fetters, even those of death. He taught and proved that the only Life is God, Spirit, and that matter and the material sense of existence are illusions, devoid of reality, substance, and intelligence. He knew that man, made in God's likeness, is independent of matter and its false laws, for he is governed by the divine laws of health, happiness, and holiness.

When the Master told the Jews that the truth would make them free they protested and said that they had never been in bondage to any man. To awaken them from their dream of life in matter with its belief in the reality of both evil and good, and to lift their thought to feel the liberating power of Christ, Jesus said to them (John 8: 34-36): "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

It is the same consciousness of Christ which today through Christian Science brings freedom from sin, fear, disease, and strife—all products of the carnal mentality, or mortal mind. In no other way, perhaps, has Mrs. Eddy contributed more to the liberation of mankind than in her unmasking of this evil, or animal magnetism; because until this false mentality with its greed, dishonesty, malice, and cruelty is destroyed there can be no true peace and freedom. Christian Science effects error's annihilation through the spiritual understanding it brings of God as the only Mind of man, Mind that is just, upright, and capable only of good. Thus it enables us to prove that we need no longer be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness" (Eph. 4:14), but instead "may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ."

Mrs. Eddy cut the Gordian knot of materialism by revealing the all-power and infinite ability of universal divine Love to meet all the needs of humanity. Practical Christianity, as Jesus taught it and as it is repeated today in Christian Science, rises above the pantheism and mysticism of classical philosophy, above the national God of Judaism, to the divine idea of the fatherhood and motherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

Students of divine Science, increasingly governed by the higher law of Love, are emerging into a fuller salvation according to God's plan. As members of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and in willing obedience to the divine, beneficent laws of that bulwark of freedom, the Manual of The Mother Church by Mrs. Eddy, they have banded themselves together to claim and make known abroad the freedom which Abraham Lincoln prayed should not perish from the earth.

As the Alpine horn echoes its strains of freedom from cliff to cliff, so the voice of God through divine Science proclaims from land to land the eternal verities of liberty and justice. When modern ideologies would submerge the individual in the mass and drag him down to a low level of mediocrity, this Science asserts the right and ability of everyone to rise to the zenith of excellence. It strengthens the worth and dignity of the individual and promotes the attainment of heaven.

In the degree that one acknowledges the one Mind and its control of the universe and recognizes his true spiritual identity as the idea of God, he silences the suggestions of mortal mind which would deceive and enslave individuals and nations. Thus he aids in bringing to nought political, economic, and ecclesiastical despotisms and in awakening hitherto suppressed and benighted peoples to demand their rightful heritage of light and freedom. The consciousness of ever-present Life and Love frees him from the illusions of material life and lifts him out of the cramping systems imposed by false education. A poet has rightly perceived,

The chamois leaping from ledge to ledge in the free mountain air hints the liberty and dominion which are the heritage of all. He is truly free who understands his eternal unity, as idea, with the divine Mind and is governed by the law of omnipotent, ever-present Love. Of this law our Leader says (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 259): "When the Lawgiver was the only law of creation, freedom reigned, and was the heritage of man; but this freedom was the moral power of good, not of evil: it was divine Science, in which God is supreme, and the only law of being. In this eternal harmony of Science, man is not fallen: he is governed in the same rhythm that the Scripture describes, when 'the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.'"